Icon: enlarge
Markus Söder: is the corona traffic light coming?
Photo: Sven Hoppe / dpa
This article is continuously updated.
Don't miss anything: subscribe to our
coronavirus newsletter
for the latest developments and the most important background information
.
Söder for nationwide corona traffic lights
12:45 a.m.:
Bavaria's Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) calls for a nationwide corona traffic light.
"We now need a binding, proportionate and reliable set of rules for the winter," said Söder of the "Süddeutsche Zeitung".
The core must be the introduction of a warning light for all federal states as well as specifications as to which measures should be taken if the number of infected people exceeds certain limit values.
According to Söder's suggestion, the corona traffic light turns yellow if there are 35 or more infected people per 100,000 inhabitants in a district within seven days, according to the "SZ".
In order to prevent further spread of the virus, preventive tests could then be ordered for risk groups, spectators no longer admitted to sports events of national importance and the mask requirement in schools could be extended to lessons from the fifth grade.
If the number increases to 50 infected people, the number of participants allowed at private events should be reduced to a quarter of the number that was valid until then.
However, the SPD health expert Karl Lauterbach rejects a corona traffic light.
This would send out the wrong signals, he warned on Sunday evening on the Internet broadcast "Bild live".
In his words, for example, the signal would be given in a district: "You can live as if everything were normal".
This creates the feeling of "false security": "The whole symbol of a traffic light with green, yellow and red does not fit the time", emphasized Lauterbach.
Health insurance: Because of Corona 100 times more applications for payment in installments
00.30 a.m.:
Because of the economic crisis in the corona pandemic, many companies apparently have problems paying the contributions to the health insurance companies for their employees.
At Techniker Krankenkasse (TK) alone, the number of deferral requests has increased by 60 times, as CEO Jens Baas told the newspapers of the Funke media group.
"The number of applications for payment in installments is 100 times as high as before," he said.
That is a dramatic increase compared to the average of previous years.
The applications would come from economically troubled employers, said the head of Germany's largest health insurance company.
TK has around ten million insured nationwide.
Baas also expects a significant increase in contribution rates due to the pandemic.
"The contributions will increase significantly in the coming years," said Baas.
The currently planned increase by an average of 0.2 percent will "perhaps postpone the current financial problem of the cash registers, but not solve it".
The statutory health insurances could only reduce their reserves once, "then they are gone".
According to Baas, the health insurers incur high expenditures in the current pandemic "through the protective measures financed by the statutory health insurance, such as setting up intensive care beds or buying protective equipment".
The treatment of corona patients, however, has "hardly any financial impact".
First corona death in a Greek refugee camp
12:20 a.m.:
According to the government, a resident of a refugee camp died of Covid-19 for the first time in Greece.
A 61-year-old Afghan who was housed in the Malakasa camp near Athens died in a hospital in the Greek capital, the Ministry of Migration said on Sunday.
Malakasa and the nearby Schisto and Elaionas camps were quarantined at the beginning of September due to increasing numbers of infections.
The corona virus had recently spread strongly in the Greek refugee camps.
In a controversial interim camp on the island of Lesbos alone, more than 240 asylum seekers tested positive for the virus.
The camp was hastily built after the Moria refugee camp was destroyed by fire.
Around 12,000 people previously lived there.
When they moved into the new camp, all residents were tested for corona infection.
Icon: The mirror
ptz / dpa / AFP / Reuters
